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A glitch compensation methodology is proposed in this paper which involves reducing the undesired switching of selected combinational cells from a place and routed standard cell layout in order reduce peak dynamic voltage or IR drop. The proposed methodology can be seamlessly integrated to existing physical design flow. A glitch is an undesired transition that occurs before intended value in digital...
The occurrence of a multiple node upset is likely to increase significantly in nanoscale CMOS due to reduced device size and power supply voltage scaling. This paper presents a comprehensive treatment (model, analysis and design) for hardening a memory cell against a soft error resulting in a multiple node upset at 32nm feature size in CMOS. A novel 13T memory cell configuration is proposed, analyzed,...
As technology is scaled down, supply voltage and gate capacitances are reduced which degrades the reliability of the circuits. For near sub-threshold region design, this causes even more serious reliability issues because the supply voltage is reduced to near the threshold voltage of the devices. Soft error is one such phenomenon which changes internal node voltage due to external noise. Hence it...
We present novel circuits for high-voltage digital level shifting with zero static power consumption. The conventional topology is analysed, showing the strong dependence of speed and dynamic power on circuit area. Novel techniques are shown to circumvent this and speed up the operation of the conventional level-shifter architecture by a factor of 5-10 typically and 30-190 in the worst case. In addition,...
The C-element is a fundamental component in asynchronous circuits and quite used in synchronous circuits to mitigate transient faults. This work evaluates the transient-fault effects on the traditional dynamic, conventional, weak feedback, and symmetric C-element's implementations. An evaluation methodology is developed by means of fault-injection simulations at transistor level. Unlike existing methods,...
A novel high-speed and low-power negative level shifter suitable for low voltage applications is presented. To reduce the switching delay and leakage current, a novel bootstrapping technique is designed for the level shifter. Furthermore, a pull-down driver is proposed to have high driving capability under different operation modes. The circuit has been designed in 130 nm 1.5 V/5 V triple-well CMOS...
This paper presents an energy efficient bootstrapped CMOS driver to enhance switching speed for driving large RC load for ultra low-voltage CMOS VLSI. The proposed bootstrapped driver eliminates the leakage paths in the conventional bootstrapped driver to achieve more positive and negative boosted voltage levels and to allow the boosted nodes to maintain the boosted levels, thus improving boosting...
Tolerance to soft errors has become a strict requirement in today's nanoscale CMOS designs. This paper proposes a new hardening design technique for CMOS memory cell at 32nm feature size. The proposed hardened memory cell overcomes the problems associated with the previous designs by utilizing novel access and refreshing mechanisms. Simulation shows that the data stored in the proposed hardened memory...
In this paper, an SET and SEU tolerant latch suitable for use in embedded systems called SETUR (single event transient and upset robust latch) is presented and evaluated. The SETUR is based on the use of a redundant feedback line and a CMOS delay element to tolerate the effect of the SETs occurring in the input line of the latch as well as SEUs occurring inside the latch. The experimental results...
Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are getting more and more attractive for military and aerospace applications, among others devices. The usage of non volatile FPGAs, like Flash-based ones, reduces permanent radiation effects but transient faults are still a concern. In this paper we propose a new methodology for effectively measuring the width of radiation-induced transient faults thus allowing...
Present and future semiconductor technologies are characterized by increasing parameters variations as well as an increasing susceptibility to external disturbances. Transient errors during system operation are no longer restricted to memories but also affect random logic, and a robust design becomes mandatory to ensure a reliable system operation. Self-checking circuits rely on redundancy to detect...
This document presents a compilation of results from tests performed by iRoC Technologies on SER induced by alpha particles on SRAM memories for technology nodes from 180 nm to 65 nm. The aim of this study is to establish the variation of sensitivity with technology node for SEU and MCU, and to analyze the possible influence of different designs and technological parameters at a given technology node.
The implementation of complex functionality in low-power nano-CMOS technologies leads to enhance susceptibility to parametric disturbances (environmental, and operation-dependent). The purpose of this paper is to present recent improvements on a methodology to exploit power-supply voltage and temperature variations in order to produce fault-tolerant structural solutions. First, the proposed methodology...
Polymorphic gates can be considered as a new reconfigurable technology capable of integrating logic functions with sensing in a single compact structure. Polymorphic gates whose logic function can be controlled by the level of the power supply voltage (Vdd) represent a special class of polymorphic gates. A new polymorphic NAND/NOR gate controlled by Vdd is presented. This gate was fabricated and utilized...
With technology scaling, vulnerability to soft errors in random logic is increasing. There is a need for on-line error detection and protection for logic gates even at sea level. The error checker is the key element for an on-line detection mechanism. We compare three different checkers for error detection from the point of view of area, power and false error detection rates. We find that the double...
Soft errors induced by cosmic radiation have become an urgent issue for ultra-deep-sub-micron (UDSM) technologies. In this paper, we propose a new radiation hardened by design latch (RHBDL). RHBDL can improve robustness by masking the soft errors induced by SEU and SET. We evaluate the propagation delay, power dissipation and power delay product of RHBDL using SPICE simulations. Compared with existing...
In this paper, we present a new technique to improve the reliability of H-tree SRAM memories. This technique deals with the SRAM power-bus monitoring by using built-in current sensor (BICS) circuits that detect abnormal current dissipation in the memory power-bus. This abnormal current is the result of a single-event upset (SEU) in the memory and it is generated during the inversion of the state of...
Transient faults have become increasingly observable in combinational logic. This is due to the weakening of some inherent protective mechanisms that logic traditionally holds against such flawed spurious events. One of the aforementioned mechanisms relates to the propagation of transient faults along sensitizable paths. Existing literature that relies on logic simulation under estimates the number...
In this paper, we investigate optimum radiation hardened by design (RHBD) for use against single-event transients (SET) using low-pass filters (LPF) including RHBD techniques against single-event upsets (SEU) for sequential logic in 45 -nm technology in a terrestrial environment. Three types of LPF were investigated regarding their SET pulse immunities, area penalties, and performance penalties. We...
This paper compares readout powers and operating frequencies among dual-port SRAMs: an 8T SRAM, 10T single-end SRAM, and 10T differential SRAM. The conventional 8T SRAM has the least transistor count, and is the most area efficient. However, the readout power becomes large and the cycle time increases due to peripheral circuits. The 10T single-end SRAM is our proposed SRAM, in which a dedicated inverter...
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